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Was having a discussion last night with some DiS writers about writing reviews, and the things other people do that irk us or that we worry we do that really piss off other people.

I guess a lot of the time I write some things knowing it will rub certain people up the wrong way. Not really in a trolling sense, but moreso because I hate the idea of compromising my writing for the sake of being agreeable. Perhaps that makes me a shoddy writer, but I personally love writing that tells you as honestly as possible what someone thinks, and if that is breathless glee, then I'll probably be swept up by it and find myself listening to the album before I've finished reading the review. Enthusiasm - done right - can be really infectious.

and being able to convey the emotional connection or resonance they had with music, how it triggered something in them, why its deemed worthy or not
and having someone tell you nothing or little about the music itself, and getting lost in their own sense of themselves and their craft.

i could have worded this in more vitriolic terms, but it wouldn't really aid the point im trying to make.

i like reading reviews where there's more sense of passion for the music (or music in general) which is being written about rather than someone's passion for the writing (or the writing process) itself.

If there's a passion for the subject matter i can often excuse a lack of craft itself, as its the music im fundamentally interested in.

I appreciate that it's not always easy to write intelligently and lucidly about what something sounds like, then draw comparisons, give a little background, and inject a smattering of opinion, all whilst sounding 'professional', or even (and fuck this) 'academic'.

Reviews that manage this are worthy of some praise, sure. But really, I think that I can only love a review (so give the review an 8/10 or more) when the reviewer invests as much in their writing as they do in the music they're writing about, when they fucking cut loose and dance a bit. True, it doesn't always work out, and it can be arrogant, self-serving, and lead to downright awful prose, but I've started to feel recently that the risk is worth it for the times it gets pulled off. A writer can be as knowledgeable and skilled as you like, but unless there's some indication in their review of the ecstasy that music invokes(whether the writer loves or hates who they're writing about)then I'm never going to love it, it's never going to be any more than another dried-up A-Level textbook entry.

I kinda wish more people were harsher with their scores. a 5/10 shouldn't be anything but a 'meh'.
Contributors - perhaps rightly so - get so angry when you turn a 8 to a 7 or a 7 to a 6, and it seems kinda crazy that they have their own idea of what these scores are, whereas everyone else seem to have this idea that all DiS reviews are equal. I struggle with calling anything a 10/10 (although I have done so with Blondes this year, and nearly did with Chromatics... although I'm slowly thinking the latter is a 10/10 too). I find harsh scores much easier to give, whereas others seem to think anything below a 6 is so terrible and lacking any merit. I'd give most things I hear 4/10, and only begin to mark upwards if it moves me. Anything that makes me curious enough to play it more than 10 times gets nearer a 6/10 and then anything that I start to realise is truly special moves toward the 7s and 8s. It's only when I think it's the pinnacle of a genre or one of the 50 greatest albums I've ever heard do I begin to shift toward the 9s and 10s.
There are a lot of albums I'd give a 9 or 10 to that DiS has given 6s and 7s to (Panic at the Disco's debut LP, for starters) and vice versa. It's an imprecise science, which probably means it's no science at all.

given the review is subjective, and the review based upon the first batch of listens may be entirely different to a review made by the same person when they were in a different headspace, or any other number of other factors outwith the music itself.

Scoring is shorthand really and personal opinion is that it holds more import than it really needs to or deserves to. It's just the roughest of outlines of what the rest of the review holds, (generally speaking).

10/10 is for all time classics only in my opinion. 9/10 is for the peak of the genre/truly innovating stuff. 8/10 is great music you know you're still gonna be listening to in a year. then 6/7 is good and 4/5 is tolerable to average. so many sites give every bloody album they review a 7 or above. it's ridiculous. they seem to think giving any album less than a 7 deems it as having no worth at all.

Best mag ever. They had the same principle of scoring: a 50% meant exactly average, 80% meant bloody good, 90% was extremely rare. But in a market where 'average' games got 78% from other mags, AP seemed incredibly harsh.

9/10 approaching pinnacle of genre is how I see it too. For instance, Koi No Yokan is brilliant and I love it, but I'd give it 8/10 tops, not 9 or 10.

The tinymixtapes review of Instrumental Tourist is a classic example of pseudo philosophical nonsense masquerading as music writing. Whether it's boring or not, it's good to know:

i) what does it 'sound like' (glitchy, fuzzy, etc)
ii) who does it sound like (kindred spirits sort of thing)
iii) is it any good (subjective I know, but if it needs tunes, does it have them)
iv) would I like it if I like their other stuff or stuff by their kindred spirits

Reviews that suggest they're authoritative enough to assign 10s are annoying (e.g. the XX). To me, a 10 is something you award in retrospect after the music community has had time to assimilate a record, understand it in its context (cultural, social, political, whatever) and establish whether it something that stands the test of time. Pitchfork's Disintegration Loops 10 seems fair, after the event, but would it have been at the time, probably not.

Humour is good.
Novel approaches to reviews are good for a bit of variety (can't think of one off hand).
5 or six medium length paragraphs is good too.
Length discourse is a turn off.

That's incredible! A beautiful example of someone who can string a sentence together, but can't actually write. Loved this comment: 'I wrote shit like this in my AS English class'.

Here's my Hate of the Day:

'That's ultimately where quick collaborators for cash wind up, do they not?'

Do they not? We're impressed by his formal language, are we not? Especially the way he mixes registers - 'wind up' is colloquial, but 'do they not?' is formal! Incredible word control! He must speak better English than us and therefore be more intelligent. We should take his opinion Very Seriously Indeed, should we not?

That must be it: otherwise he's just trying to show off with pretentious high-register phrasing.

If and when I press Alt-F4, I liken it to smothering this twat with a pillow.

"I’m reminded of the famous scene from Koyaanisqatsi called “The Grid,” which, like Instrumental Tourist, not only speaks to the microcosm that is consumerism and metropolitan life, but is also both mesmerizing and spiritual."

I mean, it's good when it works. But the only publication I've ever read that willingly tries to enforce humour is NME and most of the time it just isn't funny. Music is something that should be taken seriously, and so unless you manage to weave humour in and turn it into an aspect of your writing style that IS entertaining, I don't think it has a place.

that exists solely for music and film reviews - it's a postrock record so 'epic soundscapes' and 'wall of noise' are in the first paragraph, it's folky so pastoral scenes need to be cujoured up, the inability of almost anyone to write a meaningful review of an electronic record... perhaps there just aren't enough superlatives sometimes :D
But yes with the above, if the writer has a particular axe to grind with an act then either don't let it shape the whole article or please articulate your grudgeful feelings better so we don't feel like we're reading a blog of your shit life with incedental music.
There is still a need for music reviews despite the 'product' being there for all to hear there and then. There's too much music to listen to out there and there is still a need for people who don't have time and budgets to get everything to fall back on a trusted critic for their opinion, especially when you don't know where the next great record is coming from (ooh, heard this on soundcloud, this band on bandcamp are great, reverbnation flagged up- scratch that last one actually).

I quite enjoy reading someone giving an album a real slagging for reasons that are entirely personal and completely unrelated to what the album actually sounds like. I remember Everett True absolutely murdering Suede's Coming Up in MM back in 1996, purely because they symbolised the kind of stylised, glammed-up British pop that had blown his beloved grunge out of the water a couple of years previously. His review said little about the album & everything about the writer himself, and whilst I completely disagreed with it, it was great car-crash reading. Reviews should be subjective, not objective.

Though from my perspective it was too much of self-indulgent writing that got Everett ostracised from the weeklies, that and the whole "my mate Kurt" in every article. There are masters at getting the personal balance, like Everett and Swells but a lot of bad imitators.
I've been reading the Lester Bangs book of articles recently, that guy knew how to write! The main thing I get out of it is the debunking of this myth that he slagged everything off, the writing in this book is amazingly inquisitive and naieve in its praise for a lot of it, which I just wasn't expecting. You tend to think of him as Mr Agreeable's dad...

itd boil down to
THIS MAKES ME WANT TO DANCE.
or
THIS DOES NOT MAKE ME WANT TO DANCE.

as, for me, that's its function.

I'd probably have to fling some adjectives in to describe roughly what the sound is (heavy, moody, sexy, melancholic, raging, etc). it would hardly be enlightening, informative or entertaining but i can't see the point in writing 800 words on a techno track (for example) as its not particularly cerebral music at its core.

most of the interesting stuff to write about techno and house is for the most part proper spoddy stuff, the production, the process, synth sounds and effects, tracking the influences of the individual sounds used, how they've been manipulated, the topography and history of the genre and how it fits in with that.

Its a trainspotter paradise, but for most people who buy these songs on a single by single (12inch by 12inch, whatever) basis, it will come down to will this work in a set, will this make me or the punters move. And there's not a great breadth of material to pull from that.

Is trying to indicate it was how your thought process went but you disregarded it? If so, why is it still there? I understand you're trying to show a realtime experience of the record and how it made you feel, but that's not what the review is, it's a summation of your thoughts. If that thought it now invalid and irrelevant, cut it. If it is still worth us reading about, leave it in. It's like putting ummmm in a written post to approximate speech, it's attempting sincerity but actually doing the opposite, it's just drawing attention to the artifice.

I know this is really minor and probably done by about two people and I'm usually a fan of 'experimental' things like this, but it just doesn't sit right with me.

I do it so I can say two (often contradictory or somewhat contrary) things. Mostly I do it so I can say something really harsh, but not say it at the same time. For me it's just another - stylistic - way of using brackets and sub-clauses. I like to ramble. Sometimes that rambling is totally subbed away, but like with my Gaga review, it felt like the unedited nature of the blathering fit with the style, scope and length of the record. Sometimes writing perfectly succinct and snappy just doesn't fit the record you're writing about. And I have a bit of a thing about writing my reviews in a similar tone to the record (like my How to Dress Well review was annoyingly obtuse). I realise this makes me a massive cunt.

says who boss? Neither of your solution conveys the imprecision and second-guessing indicated by the crossed-out words. Yeah it's a bit artsy or whatever, but it does communicate something that isn't quite done any other way.

that younger British writers in particular tend to use because they've only read it in American reviews that are informed by a different cultural context. I mean, arguably the fact that we don't talk about sophomore years over here means that in a perverse way the scale of misapprehension of the word means that its meaning in British English really is 'a second album', but it looks rubbish and I always edit out of people's reviews. WHAT A FUCKING BORING POST.

I want to see if there are ways of appreciating a record that I've missed, or legitimate criticisms that I hadn't thought of, or more basically, just to see if people feel the same way I do about something.

They're also useful for finding out extra info about the band, other bands doing similar things or helping to understand the context of the music - e.g. the Disintegration Loops story.

And finally I read reviews of records I don't know, because if they're written well enough, or make it sound like something I'd like (and get a high score) then I might go and listen to it, which has happened with Death Grips and Purity Ring this year.

but I know a few writers who do this really well. I think it's more fitting for blog-style writing really, or perhaps certain genres? For example, I think Oli at Sonic Router is great at this, using personal anecdotes to bring life to electronic music. There's only so many ways you can read descriptions of drum patterns before you fall asleep.

because people who are now inexplicably 'writers' have grown up reading fantastic reviews with personal experiences incorporated. They've then made the half-boiled inference that 'personal experience=good review', and proceed to shoehorn a bunch of crap into their own reviews, which as a result come off self-indulgent and clumsy. On the other hand, if personal experience is used well, it adds a whole bunch to the character of both the review and its writer.

about a bunch of stuff from Everett True's 'Live Through This', because I got it when I was fifteen and I thought it was the best thing ever. That said, reading his stuff on Collapse Board now just makes me feel a bit sad...

Even if it's total shit I want a bit of effort to enjoy it put in, not some vague references to the new album you've clearly only listened to once and the rest of the review being about all their older material being shit and the band being dickheads.

I personally find reviews that try to tell you what the music sounds like to be crushingly boring, and they are usually written by people who mistake description for insight, but there are no defined lines over which a good review mustn't step.

so I think it's important to know what it sounds like (though not for a whole review)...it's good to be enlightened by a reviewer's interpretation of a record, but this is often something I'll only do after owning the record for a few weeks or months. Then the review serves a different purpose (along the lines of rainmaker's comments above).

It's a review, not a memoir. The whole 'it left this critic cold/your loyal reporter arrived at the venue 10 mins early' feel of some reviews makes writers sound kinda pompous and affected. I know reviews are rooted in personal context and experience, but I prefer reviewers that don't put themselves at the centre of everything they write.

in the very boring: THIS IS WHO BAND IS, THIS IS WHAT ALBUM SOUNDS LIKE, AND THIS IS MY OPINION.

Then the writer may add reasonable stylistic flourishes around the basics. Respectfully, I disagree with Sean: there is NO PLACE IN PROFESSIONAL WRITING FOR RAMBLING. (Unless your name is Virginia Wolfe.) To my eyes, rambling reviews don't come across as being more authentic or honest. They just look sloppy and lazy.

I'd have said it was a relatively self-evident statement. Giving your opinion on stuff is a fun thing to do and reading someone's opinions can be fun but all they are is opinions - there's not really anything there to take seriously; certainly there's nothing massively meaningful or important about the whole process as some critics try to kid on.

I mean critics who consider themselves to be uniquely qualified and able to understand film, music or art on a different level to non-critics and hence take their opinions too seriously rather than people who write in a jokey fashion.

i do recoil a slight bit sometimes at some of the more self-important/pretentious music criticism/critics out there, but you'd have to acknowledge that there's a bit of difference between giving your opinion on something and the more longform kinds of music criticism or articles that take a wider sociological or cultural perspective.
as well the very nature of the game surely is that you are taking it seriously to some degree if you're wasting your precious leisure hours typing out 500-word articles for no tangible reward or return. yeah it'[s not massively meaningful but are you saying that if a reviewer puts genuine effort/research into what they do or aims for genuine insight that they look a bit silly? i wouldn't agree

and that's absolutely fine if the reviewer wants to do that research and write it and I don't think that makes them look silly per se - if they want to it, it's up to them really. And I don't necessarily mean that everyone should be jokey or self-effacing reviews - or that people shouldn't take the work they're writing about seriously - of course they should.

I mean more when critics regard criticism or the fact they're writing criticism and socially or culturally important and place a great deal of importance in themselves as critics and arbiters of fine taste and judgement. They're people with an opinion - no more, no less. They're hopefully people who express their opinion well in writing and can be engaging and entertaining in doing so (hence why they get paid to write reviews in the first place) but that doesn't actually mean their opinions themselves should have more importance attached to them than anyone else.

reviews that go around with a stick up their arse hammering on their opinion with backing it up in any meaningful or satisfying way, then I agree.

That said, I’m not sure about your above point that (broad sense) ‘art’ critics shouldn’t consider themselves to be better qualified when it comes to their chosen form. If somebody reads books and literary criticism 14 hours a day, then I’ll presume they’re a better reader than me. Why can’t we apply the same logic to music?

In what sense would it make them a better reader? What would that even mean?

Sure, they'd have knowledge of a wide range of books and probably be good at talking about the context of a book. But realistically critics aren't purely employed on the basis of the range of their knowledge alone - it'll also be whether their opinions fit in with the views and aspirations of the readership of a particular publication; someone could listen on loads of music and have an immense knowledge of the history and context of music but if their favourite music ever was, say, Chris De Burgh there's a fair chance few music publications would deem them appropriate to their readership. Plus there will of course be people with an intricate knowledge of films or books or music but choose to have a different career instead, or simply cannot write eloquently enough to become a critic.

But more fundamentally, however many books you've read, however well you state your opinions, it doesn't make your opinions more correct or more worthy than anyone else's. People enjoy something or they don't - it's pretty much an instinctive reaction (albeit one you'll later justify with reasons and explanations) and it's entirely entirely ludicrous to say one person's enjoyment is worth more than someone else's.

And - what's far worse, perhaps especially within art criticism - it alienates people and makes them feel art isn't for them because the self-declared experts try to pretend that they're the only people who can say if a piece of art is good or not. Which means they constantly hold up the works that reflect their own beliefs and interests and exclude the ones that do not creating a self-fulfilled prophesy of what' becomes 'canon' (at least for a time). To me the function of art is to express things, communicate and reach out to people and to turn int into an exclusive club for intellectuals utterly defeats the entire point.

Furthermore, it's easy to see from past history that critics views on what's good may well be utterly reversed in the future and are only correct within their own context. Look at the way people like Van Gogh and Blake were largely ignored by the critics of their day in favour of people who are long-since forgotten.

Yes, critics will have seen more of a particular medium and, yes, they will probably know more about similar artists and what to compare it to etc. But it's manifestly a misguided misconception to assume their opinions are in anyway more correct.

You’re right, that would be elitist and depressing. To the best of my knowledge there’s no amount of research that can alter the rightness of a person’s opinion.

Here is the statement of yours I disagree with most strongly: “I mean critics who consider themselves to be uniquely qualified and able to understand film, music or art on a different level to non-critics and hence take their opinions too seriously.”

You don’t think a good reader exists? A person with a better understanding of the art form than another person? I’m wary of stating the obvious here, but we know the quality of being a good reader exists because we feel it as we read. I can finish reading a certain book and henceforth feel better qualified to tackle other books that previously I may have deemed beyond my best perception. I imagine most literary critics are better readers than me in the sense that I imagine I’m a better reader than most children. There are certain analytical skills we expect of critics and good readers - basic understanding of the text, analysis of literary context, analysis of intent, analysis of broader social influence - and you’d be hard-pressed to invent any kind of academic test of these skills that would be *better* answered by a child than a critic. It doesn’t make their opinion more right, but by my definition it does make them better qualified.

I won’t address the second paragraph - yeah, certain publications use critics with different frames of reference - because I don’t think the presence of a known readership invalidates the critical qualification argument or in any way contradicts my opinion. In fact, it further helps measure a critic’s degree of qualification by establishing a more specific framework by which to judge exactly what said readership requires. Again, it doesn’t make the critic’s opinion more right, but if they’ve been accurately deemed by their editor to have a broader knowledge-base and sense of perception on a given topic than the average reader (which is a primary goal for most critics, isn’t it?) it does make them better qualified to express that opinion in that publication.

As for the Van Gogh/Blake argument, predicting how a work will be perceived in future is only one facet of criticism - if that - not the sole purpose. There’s no need to devalue the entire form based on failure to fulfill a single criteria. All that said, I’m not sure that at the core of it we actually disagree. Feel free to prove me wrong.

possibly a bit rose tinted, but it does feel like a dying art. There's a certain school - which DiS is as guilty of as anyone - of rant reviews being the only time people seriously attempt humour, but there's really no reason why you can't put a gag into a positive review, it's only a bunch of fucking musicians.

makes me fucking cringe like the mother of an outed paedophile. Over-used and past its sell-by date.

I like angry writing, as long as you can tell that there's some justification for the anger, a real indignance at the insulting naffness they've been presented with and a believable sense of deserving and demanding something better, rather than the mere desire to show off and try (fail) to be David Stubbs.

And reviews where you could tell that the writer didn't know what the hell to say about the record, felt totally out of their depth and just burbled something to fill the word count. I think lots of writers have written those reviews, and I guess depending on yr situation sometimes it's unavoidable but I'd rather not write the review at all, and ideally pass it to someone with a worthwhile opinion/understanding of the band or record, than churn out something rubbish for the sake of it.

I hate that kind of comparison, and it's also hugely inaccurate because they are no where near as good as at the drive-in covering the smiths, which by the way, sounds like this;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_b2xbA7JXg

a great deal of reviewers don't possess
adequate knowledge to provide accurate reference points, so they just draw tenuous comparison to the acts that they do know with any kind of superficial similarity.

...is fine up to a point, but there's nothing that bores me more than reading a review written by someone i'll never know, slinging his/her jizz all over the page like anyone should give a fuck. i like a few facts followed by a few personal interpretations of the music, that regardless of the writers opinion, has been elucidated in such a way that will give me an idea if i might like it or not. its not fucking rocket surgery.

was in a review of a George Michael album in Word, think it was about 2004. The reviewer didn't like the album's lack of melody & said something like "the most damning thing I can say about this album is that none of the songs could be played on an acoustic guitar". So fucking what? You could say the same about the entire discographies of Kraftwerk, Public Enemy or Miles Davis. So many reviewers are still in thrall to the Dylan-inspired singer-songwriter paradigm that they don't take anyone seriously until they've "gone acoustic" - look how much more critical kudos Nirvana got when they did Unplugged, as if Nevermind wasn't enough.

& begin with a lengthy discourse about his career history - Walker Brothers blah blah, bigger than the Beatles blah, nervous breakdown, Jacques Brel covers blah blah, Scott IV commercial disaster blah blah, working men's clubs, Nite Flights blah blah & so on. Every fucking album he releases, same thing, as if anyone reading a Scott Walker review in 2012 would be unaware of his history.

In the time between Scott Walker albums, a whole generation of listeners can come of age who might not know who he is. The new one only being six years since the last throws this off a bit, but still.

Agreed that the 'potted history' approach is often a convenient way to reach a certain word count without having to talk about the record.

That's another thing about Scott Walker: his stuff takes time to process, and how do you say if it's 'good' or not? I would hate having to file a review after only hearing it for a couple of days - I wouldn't say I get The Drift even now.

So what do you do? You either fill the review with history, waffle about avant-garde atonalism or come clean and say 'I don't know, it was like a load of buzzing and wailing wtf. Prefer Pablo Honey'.

They'll never get out from under this, and probably rightly so: Richey is a huge part of who they are. But his story isn't always relevant to the record at hand (Journals for Plague Lovers aside). Loads of their reviews still get a little 4REAL nod in there somewhere.

Whose debut was called Illmatic. Let's talk about how good it was and how it moved hip-hop forward and how nothing he's done since was as good (or was it), how he lives in its shadow etc, then on the last paragraph say 'The new one is 69 minutes long and is pretty good I guess'.

"folktronica", "psych" - all those stupid bullshit terms. Just tell us - does it rock, is it Bon Iver crap, is it twerpy bleep stuff, hip hop bullshit. Hell, even those are dumb. Just link us to samples of the tracks, we'll figure it out for ourselves.

rather than the album. Bob Dylan is invariably the beneficiary of this, so occasionally is Tom Waits (look at the gushing reviews the awful Glitter & Doom live album received), and Nick Cave seems to have joined the pantheon too. It's almost as if they're afraid that, by correctly pointing out that a legendary artist's latest album is a bit crap actually, they'll be kicked out of the Serious Music Journalist club.

Pretending that a classic artist's new album is a RETURN TO FORM when it quite obviously isn't is related to this, with pretty much every Bowie album since the early 80s being prime examples.

The funny thing is that I think I just don't want to read a review by myself 10 years ago, because that person is wholly uninteresting to me now...
I wrote a couple reviews for Plan B years ago and am ashamed of that because I thought I had something to say, but I was just a nerd fumbling around.

you're a critic, not a comedian and 99% of people aren't nearly as funny as they'd like to think, so I dislike people who constantly try and inject humour in their reviews.

and people who use a music review as some kind of catharsis for whatever personal problems they're enduring at the time. go see a therapist or write a blog.

i like reviews that are quite forceful/authoritarian. you're offering your opinion, not entering a debate, so as long as you're backing up your rational and train of thought soundly and are actually knowledgeable of what you're writing i really enjoy quite polemic and almost 'snotty' (not quite the write word I'm looking for but it's late) reviews.

although it's called 'things you love and loathe' it's 99% loathing in the comments. Conclusions:

-there's more stuff about record reviews that winds people up than otherwise.
-people on here love to moan.

I enjoy reading and writing reviews on here to be honest. The things I love best about music reviews are when you get that sense that the reviewer really clicked with a record and they infect you with your enthusiasm and made you check it out. Anais Mitchell's Hadestown would be an excellent case in point. Never heard her before, read the review, thought 'that really sounds like it's going to be amazing', got the record and it was.